Joe Biden’s trip to France to celebrate the 80th anniversary of D-Day was a well-orchestrated and well-choreographed reminder of the outsized role that the United States has played in the post-World War II era. American leadership has been and remains indispensable in protecting freedom and promoting democracy in Europe and elsewhere.
But Biden wanted to use his trip to speak to a domestic as well as international audience. He hoped the symbolism of all that America did, and of the heroic sacrifices made by Americans, to rescue Europe from the grip of fascism would rally contemporaries to the cause of saving democracy.
It was a noble ambition, but one that is unlikely to pay big dividends.
Biden’s simple human decency shone through as he toured the Normandy American Cemetery, marked by row after row of crosses and Stars of David, sharing quiet words with some of the few remaining survivors of that fateful day. And, in two speeches, Biden offered plenty of nostalgia, appropriate to honoring those who fought on D-Day and after.
Mixing the evocation of past glories with stern warnings about the present dangers to democracy, the president said on Thursday, “We know the dark forces that these heroes fought against 80 years ago. They never fade. Aggression and greed, the desire to dominate and control, to change borders by force — these are perennial. The struggle between a dictatorship and freedom is unending.”
“To surrender to bullies, to bow down to dictators, is simply unthinkable. Were we to do that, it means we’d be forgetting what happened here in these hallowed beaches. Make no mistake, we will not bow down. We will not forget.”
On Friday, he again tried to mix straight talk about democracy’s perils with an appeal to Americans to imitate, in our time, what the troops who landed on the Normandy beaches did in theirs. “Democracy,” Biden observed, “begins with each of us, begins when one person decides there’s something more important than themselves … when they decide the mission matters more than their life, when they decide that their country matters more than they do.”
“That’s what the rangers at Pointe-du-Hoc did,” Biden said, urging his listeners to be “keepers of their mission, the bearers of the flame of freedom that they kept burning bright.”
“They’re summoning us now,” President Biden claimed. “They’re not asking us to scale these cliffs. But they’re asking us to stay true to what America stands for.”
Stirring words for sure, but as we recall the facts of our own crisis of democracy, we can grasp why speeches at battlefields where America achieved glory won’t do the trick if he is to put democracy at the center of our concerns in this election year.
First there is the simple fact that Americans are woefully ill informed about our past, including about what happened on D-Day. As journalist Nicholas Goldberg wrote last year, “Most Americans don’t know which countries the United States fought against in World War II or when the U.S. Constitution was ratified. … Many people today do not know what D-Day is and why it is celebrated every year.”
The Economic Times reports, for example, that “a user at Reddit wrote, ‘I thought D in D-Day was short for Doomsday.’ Another user wrote, ‘Didn’t D stand for Decision?’” Hard to enlist people to follow an example about which they are profoundly ignorant.
Even if they knew about D-Day, Biden’s audience has much less belief in, or reverence for, heroes than does the president and members of his generation.
More than two decades ago, Harvard University’s Peter Gibbon argued that Americans no longer believe in heroes. Ours, he said, is an age in which people think there is “nothing to admire,” identifying several sources and indicators of the “disappearance of public heroes.”
“Athletes,” he said, “have given up on being team players and role models. Popular culture is often irreverent, sometimes deviant. Revisionist historians present an unforgiving, skewed picture of the past. Biographers are increasingly hostile toward their subjects. Social scientists stridently assert that human beings are not autonomous but are conditioned by genes and environment.”
“In an age of instant communication, in which there is little time for reflection, accuracy, balance or integrity,” Gibbon said. “The media creates the impression that sleaze is everywhere, that nothing is sacred, that no one is noble, and that there are no heroes.”
Twenty years later, the situation is worse. Heroism, especially in warfare, remains under a cloud of suspicion.
As Dennis Aftergut and I wrote in 2022, “Heroism has fallen fell so far that in 2016, America elected as president a man who shamefully denigrated the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. McCain was a Navy fighter pilot who was shot down during the Vietnam War and heroically refused to leave captivity until all his fellow POWs were released. … Donald Trump said, ‘He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.’”
Unfortunately, such cynicism and disrespect has more appeal in contemporary America than Biden’s nostalgia and reverence for the so-called Greatest Generation. That is why Trump did not pay a price for his comments about McCain or for calling people who died in wars “suckers” and “losers.”
As Biden returns home, we can feel pride in the way he represented this country on his trip to France. But his task now is to show cynical, irreverent Americans that their fates and ways of life are tied to the survival of democracy and the values for which the D-Day heroes fought.
It will not be easy for him to do so.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence & Political Science at Amherst College.